Next-generation not needed says Rockstar, Ubisoft disagrees

Grand Theft Auto V may offer the largest city ever seen in a GTA title but Rockstar maintains that in doing so the Xbox and PS3 still never crumbled under the strain

Grand Theft Auto 5 was not a challenge on current-generation consoles, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 according to Rocksta's Dan Hauser in an interview with IGN.

In the interview Dan said that "at a creative level, which is the most important for us, we could say everything we wanted to say and do everything we wanted to do on these machines"

In response to being asked why GTAV wasn't being made for next-generation consoles like the Xbox 720 or the PS4 Hauser pointed out that, "We didn't sit there saying, "We'd like to do this in the game, but we can't." There's plenty of power in these machines."

In stark contrast Ubisoft's Technical Director for Assassin's Creed 3 Marc-Antoine Lussier argues that in fact the current generation is beginning to cause problems.

"Sometimes it can be frustrating, now that we know a new generation is coming at some point in time in the future, it's not as exciting as a new generation, but the challenge on the other side is very motivating."

While these are from two different angles, creative and technical, Lussier pointed out that even when trying to create the large historical battles integral to the storyline of the game there were some severe challenges involved.

"The biggest problem we had was that the machine was still the same after the last two so we thought there was no more juice we could get out of that thing but it's almost a miracle and it's all because of AnvilNext."

"We can have a couple thousand NPCs that you see in the distance and as you get closer...we dynamically switch from low detail NPC to full detail NPC as you get near, so you have the illusion of being surrounded by a gigantic crowd and it works."